will mock her dead,
passing by on the other side, wagging their heads and thrusting
their tongues in their cheeks at her, saying, 'Behold _her_ now,
how _she_ that was fair among the nations is fallen! is fallen!'--
and only the few wise men who loved her out of every nation will
shed tears over her desolation as they pass, and cast handfuls of
earth on her body to quiet her manes, while we, her children,
stumble about our ruined habitations to find dishonorable graves
wherein to hide our shame. Dissolution? How shall it be? Who
shall make it? Do men dream of Lot and Abraham parting, one to
the east and the other to the west, peacefully, because their
servants strive? That States will divide from States and boundary
lines will be marked by compass and chain? Sir, that will be a
portentous commission that shall settle that partition, for cannon
will be planted at the corners and grinning skeletons be finger-
posts to point the way. It will be no line gently marked on the
bosom of the Republic--some meandering vein whence generations of
her children have drawn their nourishment--but a sharp and jagged
chasm, rending the hearts of commonwealths, lacerated and smeared
with fraternal blood. On the night when the stars of her constellation
shall fall from heaven the blackness of darkness forever will settle
on the liberties of mankind in this Western World. _This is
dissolution!_ If such, Sir, is _dissolution_ seen in a glass
darkly, how terrible will it be face to face? They who reason
about it are half crazy now. They who talk of it do not mean it,
and dare not mean it. They who speak in earnest of a dissolution
of this Union seem to me like children or madmen. He who would do
such a deed as that would be the maniac without a tongue to tell
his deed, or reason to arrest his steps--an instrument of mad
impulse impelled by one idea to strike his victim. Sir, _there
have been maniacs who have been cured by horror at the blood they
have shed_."(130)

This eloquent, patriotic, word-picture of _dissolution_, intended
to deter those who so impetuously and glibly talked of it, was not,
as the sequel proved, overdrawn. When delivered it was not generally
believed that a dissolution of the Union could or would be attempted.
In the Presidential campaigns of 1856 and 1860, as well as in
Congress, there was much eloquence displayed in line with the above;
few of the orators, however, believed that dissolution, with all